Socialmedialand

Careful not to seem robotic...

Imagine yourself at a party. You walk up to the host to say hello and thank them for having you:

You: “This is a great party. The food is delicious, thanks for having me.”

Host: “I’m hosting a party right now but I appreciate your comment and will respond to you soon.”

You: “Um great…”

OK, I admit that example is extreme, but I think automating your twitter account has the same effect. Twitter is a way to personalize your brand and make you seem more human to your customers. Automating that only takes you back to where you started. It’s like the invention of automated phone trees all over again, “Please hold, your tweet is very important to us. Your tweet will be responded to in the order it was received.”

I realize that last paragraph was pretty harsh and it sounds like I’m condemning all Twitter tools to the proverbial tool shed in the sky – but that’s really not the case. Tools in and of themselves aren’t bad – they’re simply tools that allow you to perform a certain function easier. It’s how you use the tools that counts.

There are a few versions of various Twitter tools out there (and some that even aggregate them into one massive account manager) so let’s talk about them as categories rather than specific sites.

Auto Reply: You could set this tool to respond to any @ message or D message with your preset reply. Kind of functions like an out of office but with the frequency of an away message. I understand the need for this if you’re going on vacation or an extended absence (could you just tweet your vacation schedule in the first place?) but other than that I don’t see the value. If you’ve simply stepped out for the day – don’t alert me, just respond to me tomorrow. I don’t expect my twitter friends to respond immediately. In my opinion this is the one that can sound most like an automated phone tree if misused.

Mainly  – as a Twitter user I see a huge possibly of these “away” messages beginning to clutter my feed and annoy me with alerts from my desktop/phone apps. Most of them are @ replies, so if I’m friends with both parties I’ll see the away message as well…multiply by number of friends in common and number of days you’ll be away and number of people who regularly write you messages, repeat for each friend using the service and add the totals together…depending on how popular this gets it could get hairy.

Auto Follow: I’m torn about auto follow. On one hand brands should follow most people who mentions their name, even if it’s negative. On the other hand – if you auto follow you’re kind of missing out on seeing what people are saying about you in the first place. And if someone just purely hates you, following them could set them off. I say use this feature with caution. Go ahead and set it up if you feel you really need it, but make sure to allot some time throughout your day/week/month to go explore who you’re following and what they’ve said about you. And unless your brand name is extremely well known – consider whether this feature would really save you that much time anyways.

Side note on auto follow: one of the big predicted trends for 2009 is cleaning out your follower list so I don’t think this will catch on except as a way for brands to build a following.

Blog Feed/RSS: This service will automatically tweet whenever you update your blog. OK sounds good – I normally tweet to update my followers when I’ve written new content because I realize they may not be checking daily (and they wouldn’t want to miss this one!) But something about this feels a little more spammy. I follow some great bloggers, @ChrisBrogan and @JasonFalls for starters, and every time they tweet with a link to their blog (which is relatively frequently) they write a unique message that summarizes the post, mostly with a witty comment and a link. It’s called a hook people. A preview. A snippet. Without it how would I know whether I really want to read it? Yes I know it will generally write the headline, at least up to the character limit cutoff, but it’s not the same as a personalized summary. If you just spent all that time writing a post, will it kill you to write an extra line and copy/paste the URL in? Again, there are exceptions. If you’re CNN, or the Huffington Post,  for example and you want to tweet an alert about every headline, of course that’s too overwhelming to do manually. Or if you have a blog with several contributors but only one Twitter account. But if you can count how many times you write a blog post per day on your fingers, this just seems lazy to me. Harsh? Maybe.

Auto Post: Is something really cool coming up that you want to tweet about but it’s not convenient to write about it at the time or you’re afraid you’ll forget? You can use auto post tools to schedule when a tweet you’ve pre-written should be twittered. I see some benefit for this for brands – set up the tweets around a huge product launch so it’s one less thing to worry about during launch time. Maybe you write tweets updating people on the schedule of a large event you’ve planned as it happens. Maybe you have a “joke of the week” or a “thought of the week” that you do as a regular segment and you don’t want to forget your great idea so you write it down earlier and set it to send at the regular time. Fun holiday idea: set a “Happy New Year” tweet to post right at midnight! Just don’t abuse it. Part of the fun of getting updates from an event is that you know what’s actually going on, not just what was planned (that’s available in the posted schedule anyways right?) Use this one when you need it but make sure to also post genuine “this second” information because that’s part of the appeal of Twitter.

Mass Message: This just sounds like spam. It makes me nervous. Everything you tweet is publicly visible to everyone you follow, so why use this feature to mass message them? Is it because the direct message will show up in your followers’ email inboxes? Is that so you can get around the spam filters they use? Reflect on these questions before you use this tool. I know I personally wouldn’t want a bunch of email messages from the brands I follow, especially after #TwitterSecret reveled that they can be over 900 characters long! If this happened to often I would unfollow. Harsh again? It’s all about permission marketing – don’t send me stuff I didn’t ask for – simple!

Auto Message: This is just a simple message that you set up to say hello to a person when they follow you. For a large brand I don’t think this is tragic – you do want to say hello to people and sometimes it’s unrealistic to be able to handle the volume of followers. Make sure to spell check the message and go for it. For smaller brands I don’t think this is necessary. Part of the appeal of a smaller brand is the personal touch, take a second to at least notice their name and read their short bio. Write one way to customers and another to employees and yet another to industry peers. This just lets them know you really noticed them and are genuinely wanting to hear from them. I would argue for larger brands that level of personal attention is possible with dedication and will you get you a considerable amount of goodwill. However I realize that even if you do take the time, what you end up writing can sound canned anyways. Sometimes after you read their profile the best thing to say is still simply, “Hello, thanks for the follow!”

So that’s my summary of the benefits and pitfalls of various types of automated Twitter tools. The most dangerous of all though is a combination of the above. I would hate to see a brand think, “Oh we need to get into this Twitter thing,” sign up for an account and then set up an automated manager to take care of the account while they continue to ignore what their customers are trying to tell them. That scenario completely bypasses the social nature of Twitter and turns it into a mere billboard on the information highway.

Keep in mind that your goal, always, is to connect and communicate (both ways!) with your customers. Using these tools to further the reach of that connection is great, using these tools to fake that connection is not. In fact it may lead to a backlash that causes more damage to your current customer relationship rather than strengthening it.

Did I miss anything? Skip something? Am I just plain wrong? Tell me what you think in the comments.

* image found at http://justlooking.recursion.org/2004/May/21#madison-rules

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